Despite loud complaints from members of the financial elite about high tax levels, it's interesting to note that they still manage to live in the finest houses, eat at the best restaurants, shop at the most expensive stores. If this is coercion, we should all experience it.

Those tempted to slough off the helpful role of the state [in the earning of private property] should... "compare the fortune accumulated by Cornelius Vanderbilt in America with what he might have accumulated had he been adopted when an infant by a family of Hottentots."

[George W.] Bush explained that he wasn't willing to take the steps outlined in the Kyoto accords - steps that both the scientific world and the international political community had agreed, with a stunning degree of unanimity, were necessary for the future viability of the earth - because he wasn't willing to jeopardize the rate of growth of the American economy. In what sense is this a rational position?

"Short-term inequality remains a problem," writes [right-wing scholar Dinesh] D'Souza... "but is it a problem we can live with?" ...After searching his soul for a few seconds, he apparently concludes that we can live with it. Of course, inequality always feels like less of a problem to those who don't live in corrugated shacks, which is why sales of D'Souza's book have probably been brisker in Manhattan than in, say, Addis Ababa or Khartoum.

Not only has capitalism failed to bring us to the brink of a scarcity-free world, but in a sense, you could say that capitalism invented scarcity - at least as a deliberate method of economic organization.... The flipside of this bounty, this endless feast, is scarcity.